In May 2011, Gov. Nathan Deal signed the law mandating a statewide jury pool that would end “forced balancing” of county jury pools. Defense lawyers have long attacked indictments and verdicts on the basis that grand juries and trial juries didn’t reflect the makeup of county populations.

Formerly, jury pools consisted mostly of registered voters, but the new law mandated that the secretary of state merge the voter list with the Department of Driver Services’ list of licensed drivers.

Because far more people drive than vote, the new jury pool made huge impacts in every county from the largest to the smallest when it took effect last year. Cherokee County went from a pool of 12,000 to 190,000, records show, while DeKalb went from about 200,000 to 735,206.

But the list includes people who previously would have never been considered for a seat in a jury box.

In the Waycross Judicial Circuit, District Attorney Rick Currie said the problem reaches into the grand jury, once a carefully researched panel of residents with clean backgrounds.

“I’ve got two people on [a grand jury] charged with felonies. They’re not felons because they haven’t been convicted,’’ Currie said. “And I had a woman call the other day and say she had just been arrested on drug charges. She wanted to know if she had to get off the grand jury.”

So what does he do?

“You just try to move the cases along as quickly as possible before you really need them,’’ he said.

Jackie Johnson, district attorney in Brunswick Judicial Circuit, has faced similar problems. The qualifying questions are simple: Are you 18, a resident of the county, a citizen of the U.S. and have you ever been convicted of a felony.

Some juries are spoiled because even people with felonies on their record say no and think they’re telling the truth, Johnson and Currie said.

That’s not the case. Felons must apply for and go through the process of having their civil rights restored, among them the right to vote. But even that slips through the cracks.

“Felons tell me they’ve been voting,’’ she said.

The problem came up in Johnson’s biggest case, the death penalty murder trial of accused mass murderer Guy Heinze Jr. When it was discovered a member of the grand jury that indicted Heinze on eight counts of murder was a felon, Johnson had to dismiss the indictment and take it to a second grand jury.

In Brantley County, where the jury pool jumped from about 2,000 to nearly 19,000, judges ask the felony question gently, “We don’t want to embarrass anyone, but …,” Clerk of Court Cindy Crews said.

McIntosh County Clerk of Court Saundra “Bootie” Goodrich said potential jurors often aren’t ashamed to answer.

“They don’t want to serve anyway,’’ she said.

The best way to identify the felons is with criminal background searches, but that’s impractical considering it’s time-consuming and expensive, Johnson said. “We typically bring in 300 people on jury day. We can’t run 300 criminal histories,’’ she said.

That doesn’t always work because people move from out of state to start over, Crews said.

That wasn’t so much of an issue when counties had jury commissions whose members researched backgrounds before putting names in the jury box.

It’s not just the felons who are problems. People who have long passed 70, the age when they aren’t required to serve, are put back on jury pools because they still drive, Goodrich said.

Under the law, she can’t just strike them off in her office. They have to report for duty, then be removed.

In one case, however, an 85-year-old man wanted to serve and did, she said.

There is also some redundancy in the list. Anyone whose name is written one way on a driver’s license and another on the voter list is likely on the jury list twice, increasing the chance of getting called.

Crews, whose name is recorded in documents as Lera Cynthia Crews and Cynthia B. Crews, scanned her jury list.